June 07, 2014

Leave My Molecules Alone

I am fascinated by the growing science behind the energy of consciousness and its effects on matter. I have long had Dr Emoto’s coffee table book on how negativity changes the structure of water, how the molecules behave differently depending on the words or music being expressed around it.

Emoto poured pure water into vials labelled with negative phrases like ‘I hate you’ or ‘fear’. After 24 hours the water was frozen and no longer crystallised under the microscope: it yielded grey, misshapen clumps instead of beautiful lace-like crystals. In contrast, Emoto placed labels that said things like ‘I love you’ or ‘peace’ on vials of polluted water, and after 24 hours they produced gleaming, perfectly hexagonal crystals. Emoto’s experiments proved that energy generated by positive or negative words can actually change the physical structure of an object.

I’m not even sure it’s a sweet idea. Imagine your drinks developing molecular aberrations depending on your mood, or the message on a poster you happened to walk past, or on the choice of music in a passing car.

I’m not even sure it’s a sweet idea. Imagine your drinks developing molecular aberrations depending on your mood, or the message on a poster you happened to walk past, or on the choice of music in a passing car.

"Emoto’s experiments were conducted with water. Why? Because sound vibration travels through water four times faster than it does through open air."

Oh no not that bit, that was just more Looby Lou. This bit:

"Consider the fact that your body is over 70% water and you’ll understand how quickly the vibration from negative words resonates in your cells. Ancient scriptures tell us that life and death are in the power of the tongue. As it turns out, that’s not a metaphor."

If you put a book on your side table and go to sleep, your own cells read the book, perform a calculation on the proportions of positive and negative expressions held within, and then turn to sludge or pure water - either of which will kill you. All this while you're dreaming of suiting up and taking Pepper for a ride.

In another experiment, Emoto tested the power of spoken words. He placed two cups of cooked white rice in two separate mason jars and fixed the lids in place, labeling one jar "Thank You" and the other, "You Fool." The jars were left in an elementary school classroom, and the students were instructed to speak the words on the labels to the corresponding jars twice a day. After 30 days, the rice in the jar that was constantly insulted had shriveled into a black, gelatinous mass. The rice in the jar that was thanked was as white and fluffy as the day it was made.

This explains why Gordon Effing Ramsey's food is disgusting. And I now feel bad about calling vegetable oil fat. :(

Think of the possibilities though. Once this exciting scientific research is combined with the new feminist biology, maybe we'll discover that viruses are caused by the Patriarchy's hatey hateful cisgendered hate words of hating.

And we'll finally be able to deal with cancer through mutually respectful non-judgemental dialogue in a safe space for person and tumour alike. Our cispatriarchal mesotheliomaphobic society has been so exclusionary towards undocumented cellular mitosis: declaring "war" and "fighting" cancer, shaming it as "malignant", and using invasive phallic medical procedures to "eradicate" the tumour. With all this negative energy being put out there, is it a coincidence that there are more people around than ever before who have had cancer?

What we need is a different approach. An enlightened approach. A feminist approach. One where we gather in drum circles and candlelight vigils to whisper loving messages of affirmation at our melanomas, so as to convince them to shrink. Much like in Ghostbusters 2.

And if that doesn't work, maybe a Twitter campaign. #YesAllOncologicalGrowths

I can deal with a universe in which some of the physical laws are, initially, somewhat puzzling. Double slit experiments, Meissner effects and such. But I’m not sure I’d like a universe run on random whimsy. “Turn the music off, Nora. You’ve made my grape juice unhappy.”

What a daft ha'p'orth. As far as I know, the coherence lifetime for liquid water molecules is of the order of femtoseconds and the coherence length around a nanometer. I have a certain grudging respect for Professor Emotron and his ability to glom onto daffy creatures like Gwyneth. It's nice work if you can get it.

This implies the position of women in the US, where women are a privileged class by law and public policy, is comparable to the position of women in Pakistan, where women are second class citizens in law and fact.

Hmmm.

"Furthermore, it is often U.S.-backed militarism that fosters [misogyny] at home and abroad."

She's trying to say that the reason why a distressingly large number of Pakistanis feel entitled or obliged to murder their wives, daughters or mothers is all America's fault, somehow. A CIA drone strike on a Taliban outpost in Waziristan is the reason why a bunch of people in Lahore felt it was OK to stone a pregnant relative to death.

"It has to do with sexism, patriarchy, misogyny—and those issues are not specific to Pakistan or to Muslims.”

Let's pass over the unfortunate implication that sexism, patriarchy and misogyny are all basically the same thing and address her second claim. Murdering female relatives certainly isn't unique to Pakistan or Muslims, but it seems odd that someone who professes concern for the lives of women should be so keen to wave away the disturbing frequency of honour killings in Pakistani and Muslim culture.

Not many Western, non-Muslim women are at risk of being slaughtered by their families for shacking up with a man they disapprove of, after all. Which is why Western feminists spend most of their time fretting about trivial or imaginary problems like "fat shaming" or vajazzling rather than complaining that they've suffered their clitorises being forcibly removed, they're forced to wear a black sack, and they might be brutally slain if they go out in public without a male family member.

So yes, not all people who do evil things to women are Pakistani or Muslim, and not all Pakistanis or Muslims do evil to women, but there's a massive difference in the way women are treated in Lahore compared with women in Los Angeles or Loughborough, and to ignore that ugly reality in favour of complaining about a nebulous overarching Patriarchy seems not very helpful to women.

"according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, “1 in 6 women reported experiencing rape or attempted rape at some time in their lives.”"

I don't know if this is true or not, but according to the FBI's crime statistics, the current US rate of rape stands at 27 per 100,000 people. Let's assume all those rapes are perpetrated by men against women: 27 out of every 50,000 females, that's 0.054% of the women of America being victims of rape in 2012. Which is 0.054% too many, to be sure, but not evidence to suggest American women are cowering in fear of the Patriarchy.

And the rate of rape has been falling for decades, apparently unaffected by drone strikes or militarism or the awful culture of misogyny.

"Even the recent massacre by a 22-year-old man in Isla Vista, Calif., who announced his planned slaughter of women as collective punishment for a life of sexual rejection, proves that we all live somewhere within the spectrum of misogynist culture"

Crazy man who kills two women and four men = brutal culture of misogyny.

"These parts of Pakistan witness, according to Tahir, “daily violence being meted out by state and non-state actors, and that feeds into an atmosphere in which violence is seen as the tool for conflict resolution.”"

Before Team America showed up, it was a happy place. They had flowery meadows and rainbow skies, and rivers made of chocolate, where the children danced and laughed and played with gumdrop smiles.

"“It’s unfortunate,” Tahir told me, “that the well-being of half of the global population is just not a priority unless it is being used to bolster cases for war and militarism as was the case in Afghanistan.”"

What they should be doing is pretending that white, middle class, college educated American women are victims of a terrifying culture of Patriarchy, concoct a false equivalency based on dodgy statistics and whataboutery so as to make believe that that there's nothing particularly troubling about the treatment of women in Islam, and then blame everything on the US military somehow.

Yes, I know - by which I mean all you've said and more there. It takes quite a bit of effort to engineer something clever-looking out of base stupidity but the writer of that article has managed it.

The Whataboutism is almost to be expected with this type of article, though actually trying to claim that the murder of Farzana Parveen at the hands of her own family outside the courthouse - the courthouse - and witnessed by a large crowd including apparently police and lawyers, is somehow not only not 'cultural' but caused by international misogyny, which in turn is entirely the fault of US drone strikes … Boy! That takes a very special kind of approach to 'critical' thinking to come up with that argument.

I like this passage from Thomas Sowell in regard to this kind of behaviour:

… it is by no means uncommon for some among the intelligentsia to depict the United States as being on trial and needing to prove its innocence - a standard seldom applied to other countries […] Comparing any society to ideals virtually guarantees that that society will be condemned as a failure, if only because it costs nothing to imagine something better than what exists - that is, to create ideals - while everything created in the real world has a cost. Moreover, our only choice in the real world is between different societies compared to each other - not compared to ideals of "social justice"

Nikw211 recently posted a link to a bunch of documentaries that some lefty group was trying to persuade people to see. It included the Michael Moore films you'd expect, but a lot of other ones too. Every single one of them was pushing some sort of anti-capitalist, environmentalist, or anti-American message, and it got me thinking:

Aren't documentaries the most dishonest of media?

Because they're presented as "non-fiction", which traps the unwary into confusing them with fact.

The lefty messages in films like Avatar, Waterworld or Soylent Green are easier to detect because the filmmaker, though he is tendentious, isn't actually trying to persuade us that the giant blue kitty people are real or that Charlton Heston is a cannibal or that Kevin Costner has sex with fish.

When Michael Moore shows people gleamingly spotless Cuban Potemkin hospitals and presents Tony Benn as some sort of impartial authority on the glories of the NHS, he is dishonest in both his message and his intent. He's deliberately using the medium to lie to us.

Same goes for the film Gasland, that told us fracking was making flames burst out of people's kitchen sinks.

Or An Inconvenient Truth, which is worth a documentary of its own to expose its nonsense.

Or Supersize Me, whose genial creator Morgan Spurlock lambasted McDonalds for their unwillingness to speak to him. Nobody has been able to recreate Spurlock's findings and he refuses to give further details to academics who have contacted him.

The standard operating procedure for documentaries since Nanook of the North has been to fabricate, falsify and selectively edit so as to support the filmmaker's agenda and pander to the prejudices of the paying audience.

Lefties love to think of themselves as highbrow, cultured folks who take a broad interest in world affairs, so they're easy marks for filmmakers who know how to tickle their egos.

I'm thinking of launching a Kickstarter to make a film proving that the Koch brothers and Margaret Thatcher and Burger King caused the Permian–Triassic extinction event for fun and profit.

JL - Yar. It's a curious sense of perspective. Grinding rural poverty in Ethiopia is OK, but people having to work for their benefits in the UK is absolute evil. Rape and murder of Pakistani women is bad, but let's talk about American foreign policy and the nebulous international conspiracy of Patriarchy instead. And this comes from people who claim to be against poverty and for women's rights. It's the lefty way.

Nikw211 - As usual, Sowell hits the nail right on the head. I'd say it was a double standard but actually it's a single standard. The West is bad, The Other is fetishised.

Human rights abuses are only notable to the extent they can be blamed on conservatives / Christians / capitalism / patriarchy / America / white men. Otherwise they may as well not exist.